Weekend of self indulgence

My friend and fellow allotment holder Will came along this morning. He is going to help me put some more felt on the roof of my shed, and also we are going to cut down three trees. I hate spending hundreds of pounds on something when with a little courage and looking at a few YouTube videos you could learn to do-it-yourself. I have bought a hundred foot lengths of rope to pull the tree down while Will cuts the branches. They are cypress trees and growing far too close to the house and will eventually cracked the foundation so we have to remove them

Amazing how days fill up. This morning we had nothing much on the calendar for today but at 10 o’clock I had a call from someone who wanted me to help in their garden. We earn part of their bread-and-butter this way. Françoise went to see the lady. I did a lot of work this morning but you could not see it. I adjusted my attitude towards a particular topic that had been bothering me and I managed to get a greater degree of distance and sublimity from it so that it wasn’t affecting me so much. That is work. You have to have the focus, the intention and the desire to make a change. Change doesn’t happen by itself. It happens because somewhere somehow you are aware that you need to move forward.

To the local plant nursery to pick up some trees and trellis. We returned to our favourite new restaurant, Hartleys, the one in the middle of nowhere. I was very chuffed because the Trip Advisor review and been very well received and it was read aloud to all members of staff. I do like encouraging people. We all need it and I don’t think the Brits are very good at it. We were told of an auction just round the corner so we attended. I realised how space age these things have become. Apart from the people bidding in the room, there were people bidding on the Internet and presumably listening into the proceedings, and people listening on the phone. Each item had been lovingly photographed and was displayed on a screen and the status was updated by the second. I don’t think we fully accommodated to the fact that distance doesn’t matter. Amazon may be using all the details from our search patterns, and that includes Youtube to build an individual personality profile of us that some people might find alarming. Personally I don’t mind if people know my preferences and it’s quite nice when you open up you choose to see all the videos that you might like carefully presented on page 1. They have of course noticed all the videos that you have seen before and spotted the pattern. No privacy folks but do you care.

I have made more space in my office by cutting a piece of the table was too large. ‘Just like that’ as Tommy Cooper would have said. amazing stuff this telepathy. I felt in a rather persecuted mood today and all sorts of self-doubt of worthiness and so on and I couldn’t figure out why because there was no reason. my wife helped me to identify the person who may have caused to attack me on the airwaves shall we say. We did identify one person whose behaviour I had criticised and probably didn’t like it. As soon as I identified this person, the mood lifted and I felt all right again and it has not bothered me touch wood for the last six hours. It does beg the question are our feelings our possession or do we pick them up? as it says in the Bible, “we are all members one another”. I reckon you could write a good few books about that.

I sit writing this with stacks of papers and files on the floor of the office. The trouble is most of the stuff appears to be redundant but I don’t know whether I will ever need it. I probably will do the day after I throw it out. Maybe we need a pre-wastepaper basket, not a real one a pretend one.

A dark cold night – well by British standards anyway. We seem to freak out when the temperature goes below zero but we read of people quite happily living in -20° to -30° and surviving to tell the tale. But then, us Brits love to whinge and it is normally about the weather. This is something that other countries must find rather strange about us but we regard the weather as a talking point. If you go abroad, it’s probably better not to comment on the weather to your hosts. there are so many differences in culture between countries that if you do the tourist bit it’s as well to mug up on it. I read that in Russia it is rude to look at people when you’re walking in the street never mind smiling at them. If you do that they will think you are mad.

And so to bed. We spoil ourselves by having four hot water bottles, two each, which we put in the bed approximately 30 min before retiring. The sheets are thus delightfully warm and welcoming.